Excel Roundup 20170601

In this month’s Excel roundup, you’ll find links to a few of the interesting articles that I’ve read recently, and links to new or updated Excel resources. Shortcuts, favourite functions, a sing-along, and many more tips.

Formulas — Don’t follow the examples at the top, in “16 Simple Formulas Every Architect Needs to Know”, where he types the numbers into the formula, instead of linking to the cells above. However, it was fun to see FLOOR and CEILING listed — they sound perfect for architects! You can read more about them on my site.

Excel Tips

Shortcuts – Here are 8 handy Excel shortcuts from Tim Berty, on the Tweak Your Biz blog. I never remember #4, even though you can see that shortcut if you point to the Filter command on the Excel Ribbon. (Level – All)

Sorting – Sorting a list of names in Excel seems simple enough, but Kevin Lehrbass looks at different ways to approach the problem, and how to choose the best option. His key questions could be asked before doing almost anything in Excel.

Resources and Tools

Table Talk – The Excel team at Microsoft has started a new “Table Talk” series, and you can see the first episode on YouTube. Host Olaf Hubel and guest Jonnie Thomas discuss what’s new in Excel, and they showed the Excel community site, where you can find tons of great Excel resources.

NOTE: If you don’t have the version of Excel that lets you set pivot table defaults, you can set and apply preferences with my Pivot Power Premium (PPP) add-in.

Excel Fun

Excel Song — If you want to entertain (or annoy) your co-workers, blast the latest Excel song from professor Clint Tuttle. He does this at the end of each school year, and you can hear more on his YouTuble playlist. My favourite is “Excel Funcs”

Word Search – Dan Harrison shares his Word Search creator. You type words into the grid, and Excel fills in the blank spaces with random letters. You could add conditional formatting, with an on/off cell, to highlight the words in the grid.

Excel Tweets — After all that heavy reading, take a break and read the weekly collection of Excel tweets, to see what people are saying about our favourite spreadsheet.